Berkeley MBA Team Takes First in National Energy Finance Challenge

A team of Berkeley MBA students took first place in the University of Texas McCombs School of Business National Energy Finance Challenge, held on September 29 in Austin.

A team of MBA students from the class of 2007, Nathan Cope, Irem Karacagil, Sheldon Kimber, Matthew Price, and Nicolas Spicer, beat out 14 other business school teams to bring home the $5,000 first prize. Severin Borenstein, the E.T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy, sponsored the team.

Each team was challenged to negotiate on behalf of a fictional US company operating as part of a liquefied natural gas consortium on an imaginary West African island. To win, the team needed to determine the optimal transfer price of gas from the production subsidiary to the consortium subsidiary and develop a market strategy for monetizing the consortium.

Cope attributes the team's victory to solid technical analysis and a strategy that integrated multiple interests through a long-term relationship with the island's government. The win placed the Haas School ahead of Harvard Business School, which came in second, and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, which took third place.

"This was a fantastic opportunity to apply skills from a broad range of MBA classes to a very realistic business problem," says Kimber. He also notes that "networking with other MBAs and recruiters was certainly very helpful" at the challenge, which was sponsored by Chevron, Tesoro, Peabody, Simmons & Co. International, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Merrill Lynch.

Management of Technology Program Joins Forces with e-TQM College in United Arab Emirates

UC Berkeley's Management of Technology (MOT) program is teaming up with the e-TQM College in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to develop a joint program in total quality management that will include executive education, staff exchanges, and mentorship.

The new Leadership Excellence and Advancement Program was launched with the e-TQM College's commitment of a $500,000 gift to the MOT program over a five-year period. The initiativealso calls for collaboration in research, publications, and measuring student performance.

"This program will broaden the focus of our MOT program as well as expand the horizons of the faculty who become involved," says Robert E. Cole, a professor emeritus at the Haas School and former co-director of MOT. Cole will serve as the executive director of the Leadership Excellence and Advancement Program, which will be housed in the Institute of Management, Innovation, and Organization at the Haas School.

MOT, the largest interdisciplinary program on campus, is a partnership between the Haas School, the College of Engineering, and the School of Information. The e-TQM College, a newly certified college in the UAE, is the first online college in the Middle East specializing in total quality management in both manufacturing and service sectors. Its goal is to provide lifelong learning opportunities at both the graduate and undergraduate levels as well as executive education.

The joint program's executive education classes will address topics such as leadership and strategy and will include Haas School faculty through a combination of distance learning, trips to Dubai, and classes at the Haas School. The classes will be offered to executives in Dubai, as well as the larger Arab business world.

Haas Ranks #8 in BusinessWeek

The Berkeley Full-time MBA program placed #8 in BusinessWeek's ranking released last week. This is the first time that the full-time program garnered a spot in the top ten.

BusinessWeek highlighted Haas as the school whose ranking had improved the most, moving up nine spots from #17 in 2004. According to the article, "The combination of a small class, exceptional faculty, and a collegial atmosphere impressed students," and "Recruiters, meanwhile, were wowed by the quality of the grads."

Recruiters surveyed by BusinessWeek ranked Haas #7 (up from #19 in 2004), as did the school's own 2006 graduates (up from #13 in 2004).

BusinessWeek's Bschool online channel also features the Haas School for having a top-five entrepreneurship program and a top-ten marketing program.

BusinessWeek bases its ranking on feedback from both the full-time MBA class of 2006 and corporate recruiters as well as on faculty research. More information on the ranking is available in the October 23 issue of BusinessWeek magazine or online at http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/index.html.

Economist Intelligence Unit Ranks Full-Time MBA Program #10

The Berkeley Full-time MBA Program was again ranked 10th best in the world in the fourth annual ranking of MBA programs by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), which released its report on October 13. Last year Haas also ranked #10.

Among programs in the US, Haas ranked #8.

Schools provide 80% of the data for the survey. Alumni and students, who are polled in the spring, account for the remaining 20%.

The EIU is the business and information arm of The Economist Group, which also includes The Economist magazine.

Contrary to popular thinking among some diversity consultants, employing workers of many different races has little effect on the average turnover in a retail workplace, according to new research by Haas School Professors Jonathan Leonard and David Levine. Employees do, however, quit more often if fewer colleagues are the same race, Leonard and Levine found.

One of only a handful of studies on how workplace demographics affect employee behavior, Leonard and Levine examined more than 70,000 employees at more than 800 workplaces of a national retailer. They outlined the results of their study in an article titled "The Effect of Diversity on Turnover: A Large Case Study" in the July issue of the journal Industrial and Labor Relations Review.

"The most important takeaway is diversity itself doesn't matter much in terms of turnover for most groups of workers," says Leonard. "It suggests that people are, at least in this sector, pretty tolerant."

Leonard and Levine's findings contradict an argument by some diversity consultants who claim that a diverse workforce reduces turnover. They also failed to find support for the argument that diverse workplaces experience more employee friction and thus require special training.

"We were interested in seeing whether in fact there really was an empirical basis for a lot of advice that is pretty commonplace in the diversity consulting industry," explains Leonard. "We discovered that, at least for the retail sector, diversity itself is not a big driver of turnover."

The study found that a workplace is most diverse when each racial group and gender is equally represented.

At the same time, the professors found support for the old proverb "birds of a feather flock together" when they discovered that racial isolation­ -- or being a numerical minority in a workplace -- moderately increases employee turnover. Thus, in a group composed of five black employees and two white employees, the two white employees would be more racially isolated than their black colleagues because of their smaller number.

"The problem for managers is that each new hire raises isolation for some groups at the same time that it decreases isolation for others," Leonard and Levine noted in the study.

Another discouraging finding was that minority groups were more likely to quit a workplace in which a greater proportion of employees were white, suggesting that diversity is difficult to sustain.

"Managers can benefit by helping employees thrive in a world of racial diversity -- a prescription that is easier to state than to implement," the authors wrote.

Jonathan Leonard is the George Quist Chair in Business Ethics and chairman of the Haas Economic Analysis and Policy Group. David Levine is the director of the Center for Health Research at UC Berkeley.

Marco Borries, senior vice president of Yahoo!'s Connected Life, will give a keynote address at the Haas School's second annual ">play," the Berkeley Digital Media Conference, in the Arthur Andersen Auditorium on November 18.

Borries directs Yahoo!'s broadband partnerships, digital home initiative, PC client experience, and its mobile products and strategy. He joined Yahoo! in 2005 after it acquired his company, VerdiSoft, which developed software to let users synchronize their personal information between PCs and mobile phones. Borries made his entrée into digital media at age 16, when he dropped out of high school to create StarOffice Suite, a competitor to Microsoft Office.

In addition to Borries' remarks, >play will host six panel discussions on issues and trends

confronting the digital media industry. The panels include "Design Perspectives on Digital Media;" "Transforming Old Media to New Media: How, When and If to Change Direction;" "(User Generated) Content Is King;" and "Copyright in a Wired World."

The >play conference, established in 2005, is organized by students and is affiliated with the Berkeley Digital Media and Entertainment Club. >play's organizers expect about half the attendees to be from Berkeley and other schools and the other half to be creative professionals and business executives.

Discount tickets are available for students and alumni. For more information or to register, visit http://www.playconference.org.

This year's conference is preceded by the inaugural Yahoo! Digital Media Case Competition with competing teams from some of the nation's leading business schools.

The Haas School will host an evening featuring two high-powered Silicon Valley CEOs, Paul Otellini, MBA 74, of Intel and John Thompson of Symantec, on Thursday, November 30, in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley. The show, called the CEO Exchange, is part of a PBS television series moderated by CNN's Jeff Greenfield.

CEO Exchange is televised on PBS and features a conversation between internationally recognized CEOs about pressing business issues. The show offers a personal perspective on business as its guests discuss the values and experiences that drive their strategies and decisions. CEO Exchange is sponsored by the Society for Human Resource Management, which hopes to use the series to raise the visibility of the human resources profession and highlight the importance of effective human capital strategies.

CEO Exchange is free and open to the entire Haas community. The event will take place in the evening at Zellerbach Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus (near Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue). The show time will be announced in the next Haas NewsWire. Tickets are free, but registration for the event will be required.

For more information about CEO Exchange, visit http://www.pbs.org/wttw/ceoexchange/.

MFE Internship Salaries Up 13% above Last Year

Fifty-eight Master's in Financial Engineering (MFE) students began their winter break internships last Monday, earning an average monthly salary of $7,259, up 13% above last year.

All MFE students seeking internships have been placed and will work through the 10- to 12-week MFE winter break, from mid-October to mid-January. The students have taken on such challenges as researching credit portfolio valuation and management, developing artificial intelligence trading models, and working with securitization teams on structuring fixed income products. Twenty-eight are working in New York, seventeen in the Bay Area, and five in Tokyo.

The interns were snapped up by companies including BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Wachovia Securities. Linda Kreitzman, director of the MFE Program, and MFE Account Manager Nebil Gali oversee the placement process, ensuring the right match between students and companies and working to bring new firms into the program. Companies hiring Haas MFE interns for the first time this year are Babcock & Brown LP, DRW Holdings, Global Energy Decisions, Merrill Lynch, and Prisma Capital Partners.

"Wall Street firms and other firms around the world look forward to the fall because of the significant contributions our students make during their internships," says Kreitzman. "Because we have a reputation for being able to source outstanding and well-rounded candidates in a short timeframe, the demand for Haas MFE candidates is stronger than ever."

Berkeley MBAs in Demand among Top Employers

With the pomp and circumstance of graduation still fresh in everyone's mind, the job market for newly-minted Berkeley MBAs appears strong. Three months after graduation, 95% of the full-time MBA class of '06 is back in the workforce.

Salaries earned by the class also remain strong. The median base salary for Haas graduates this year was $100,000, with a mean at $98,977, and Career Services has reported 70% of the graduating class received signing bonuses. The mean signing bonus was $19,924.

Technology remains the number-one sector of employment, with the financial services and consulting industries a close second and third. The energy industry is also growing, witnessed by a steady rise of students entering the field over the past two years.

Haas remains strong in entrepreneurship: Five percent of Berkeley MBA students started their own companies this year, including a hedge fund, a company that seeks to bring healthy organic food into school cafeterias, an online sports site, an alternative energy company, and a consulting firm that focuses on the advantages of employing a flexible workforce.

Employers Stepping up Undergraduate Recruiting Efforts

Employers are recruiting undergraduate business students in larger numbers this year and are adopting innovative new strategies to court Haas candidates, according to the central campus career center.

The UC Career Center provides services to all UC Berkeley undergraduate students, including business students. It is projecting employers will conduct approximately 5,000 on-campus interviews this year, with over 3,300 interviews conducted to date. That number compares to 4,461 on-campus interviews last year. Every career fair this semester has been at full capacity with about 400 employers. Another 300 employers have kept the Career Center's 25 interview rooms fully booked since September.

Among the firms represented are Goldman, Sachs & Co., Morgan Stanley, Deloitte & Touche, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Accenture, and McKinsey & Company. In the technology sector, Apple Computer, Microsoft, and Google all have been active on campus.

"Employers are fully aware that the competition for the best candidates is extremely strong," says Tom Devlin, Director of the Career Center. "I am impressed by the diversity of employers who have identified Cal as a key school for recruiting."

In addition to increasing their activity, many employers have developed innovative strategies to court job candidates. Goldman Sachs will be hosting a workshop on how to secure an internship on Wall Street as part of the Career Week program. This year, Lehman Brothers added a second summer internship session, allowing the firm to increase the number of students it brings on. Since employers have placed a greater emphasis on hiring interns, more employers have been able to offer full-time positions to their successful interns. According to Devlin, these activities have allowed students to make an earlier commitment to employers this year.

"The 2007 year looks to be one of the best employment periods in recent years for Haas undergraduates," says Devlin.

Staff News

Bart Decker Joins Business Development at the Center for Executive Development

Bart Decker has been working as a business development consultant within the Center for Executive Development (CED) since February. After contracting for six months, he became a full-time career staff member on August 3. Decker builds productive relationships with corporate clients interested in CED's open-enrollment executive education programs. He also assists in the creation and sales of custom programs for individual corporations.

Decker has worked as a key accounts manager for a microbiology company, as a sales representative for Levi Strauss & Co., and as a part-time member of a sales team for a high-end Persian rug gallery. He also served four years in the US Army-Infantry in Germany, Iraq, and Kuwait. The Bay Area nativeholds a bachelor's degree in liberal arts from John F. Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill.

Aaron George Joins Development as Associate Director of Reunion Giving

Aaron George started work on September 25 as the development office's associate director of reunion giving. George will raise funds from MBA classes celebrating their 5-, 10-, 15-, 20-, and 25-year anniversaries. He also helps establish volunteer reunion committees among these classes, works with those committees to plan the Reunion Weekend, and helps with other fundraising events for the Haas Annual Fund.

Before coming to Haas, George spent two-an-d-a-half years in the development office of UC Cal Intercollegiate Athletics, where he worked with alumni of the men's and women's swimming, diving, and water polo programs. He graduated from Cal Poly with a bachelor's degree in sports management and, after college, worked with the YMCA and other youth sports programs. George has also coached many young teams, primarily in baseball and basketball. A former baseball player, he now enjoys competing recreationally in softball. George lives in Corte Madera and is a dedicated Cal sports fan.

Marguerite "Meg" Roundy joined the development office on September 25 as associate director of student-alumni relations. This is a new position created to foster enduring relationships between alumni and current students in all six degree programs. Roundy also hopes to help members of both groups establish strong bonds with the entire Haas community.

Roundy has a background in non-profit development, having worked with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in Sausalito for two years and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in Los Angelesfor three-and-a-half years. She holds a bachelor's degree in geography from UC Santa Barbara. In fact, everyone in her family is a UC alum, and her father, Robert, works in the Chemistry department at Cal. "We bleed blue and gold," she says proudly. Roundy grew up in New Jersey and enjoys walking half-marathons, swimming, and watching reality TV programs. The Amazing Race is her current favorite.

John Stafford joined the Marketing & Communications team as the new senior marketing manager last week. He serves as the managing editor of Haas NewsWire, CalBusiness magazine, and the annual report of private giving. Stafford has extensive news publications experience, having founded and served as managing editor of the San Francisco online lifestyle magazine Orange. He also has written for Stanford Business, the alumni magazine of Stanford University's business school, and for the Stanford News Service. He previously served as editor-in-chief of San Francisco Foghorn, the student newspaper at the University of San Francisco. Stafford completed his master's degree in Communication (Journalism) at Stanford University this summer.

A native Californian, Stafford is an amateur photographer and a modern art and architecture enthusiast. He also enjoys reading history, particularly the history of computer science and the personal computer industry.

Terrence Hendershott, assistant professor of the Haas Operations and Information Technology Management Group, was interviewed in an October 20 Wall Street Journal article titled "Death of a Middleman," regarding the role of middlemen in financial markets. For the full article: http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB116128137854697949.html

Jonathan Leonard, George Quist Chair in Business Ethics and Haas Economic Analysis and Policy Group Chair, and David Levine, Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Chair in Business Administration, were mentioned various news outlets regarding their study "The Effect of Diversity on Turnover: A Large Case Study":

BERKELEY-COLUMBIA MBA SPEAKER SERIES with Wired's Chris Anderson
Friday, November 17
12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m.
Arthur Andersen Auditorium, Haas School
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, will discuss his best-selling new book The Long Tail. The event is open to the greater Haas School and UC Berkeley communities on a first-come, first-served basis.

NEW ENGLAND ALUMNI - Reception and Presentation with Dean Tom Campbell
Thursday, November 2
Boston - Details to come
Save the date for an evening reception and presentation with Dean Tom Campbell in Boston. Dean Campbell will present his fiscal and political predictions.
For information, contact Celine Pan at celine_pan@yahoo.com.

OBIR Colloquium
Justin Kruger, Stern School of Business, New York University
Wednesday, November 1
4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Room C325 Cheit Hall
For more information, contact Deborah Houy at houy@haas.berkeley.edu.

Institutional Analysis Workshop
"The Impact of Uncertain Intellectual Property Rights on the Market for Ideas: Evidence from Patent Grant Delays" by David Hsu, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Thursday, November 2
4:10 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Room C325 Cheit Hall
For more information, contact Anita Stephens at stephens@haas.berkeley.edu.

The Haas NewsWire is the bi-monthly electronic news publication for the Haas community published every Monday by the Marketing and Communications Office at the Haas School. Send your news, feedback, and suggestions to haasnews@haas.berkeley.edu.